CPS approves largest school closure in Chicago’s history
May 23, 2013|By Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, John Chase and Bob Secter | Tribune reporters
Months of argument and anguish over Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s push for sweeping school closings came to a climax Wednesday as his hand-picked Board of Education voted to shut 49 elementary schools and transfer thousands of children to new classroom settings.
Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett withdrew her recommendation to close four other schools at the last minute as it became clear some board members would fight to save them.
But the board gave a ringing endorsement to Emanuel’s vision for a downsized school system, which he argues will help combat a massive budget deficit and allow the district to distribute scarce resources more efficiently.
Critics were unconvinced, and many forcefully expressed objections during and after Wednesday’s board meeting. Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th, one of several City Council members who spoke on behalf of schools in their wards, argued that schools serve as the glue of many neighborhoods.
“Closing a school is akin to closing a community,” Pawar said.
But Byrd-Bennett, in urging a vote for the administration’s proposal, said that doing nothing to address underused and poorly performing schools was harmful to children.
Note that the schools closed and neighborhoods affected are predominantly black.
Byrd-Bennet’s argument in the last paragraph above is absolutely bass-ackward. First, she says the kids in an area aren’t learning as much as they should, so we’re going to close their schools. Think about it! That’s equivalent to saying there’s too much crime in this area, so we’re going to close the police stations there … or there are too many undocumented immigrants crossing the U.S./Mexico border, so we’re going to lay off half of our Border Patrol agents.
Second, what exactly does she mean when she says the schools are “underused”? She means there are fewer kids in each class than in some other schools. So we’ll “solve” that by closing those schools and significantly increasing the class size in their new schools, thus hurting both the new kids and the kids and teachers who have been there.
I was in graduate school in Durham, NC, a few years after the city schools had been integrated. A lot of the white parents who could afford it had subsequently moved to suburban subdivisions outside the city limits (city and county were separate school systems). This meant that the city schools had fewer students overall, but the ratio of blacks to whites was higher. My wife had just started a new job at predominantly black Burton Elementary School, which had been a source of pride for its neighborhood and the nearby “projects.”
So I read a story in the newspaper saying that because their average class size was around 20, the city was going to close a number of schools. I hit the roof, because my wife’s 4th grade class had 34 students in it! The school zones had been drawn in such a way as to have significantly lower class size in predominantly white schools than in my wife’s predominantly black school.
Luckily, I knew a reporter for the Durham newspaper, and I got him to look into it. He did and wrote a story revealing what was happening. Lo and behold! In about a week a number of kids were transferred out of Burton and the average class size was more workable. One small victory. But that was over 40 years ago. Today the same stunts are being played out in big cities all over the country, on a vastly greater scale.
Parents who can afford it will begin taking their kids out of the public schools and sending them to for-profit charter schools. So more public schools will be closed. It’ll be de facto privatization.
